INTERACT ARCHITEC ADAPTIVE WORLD Michael Fox, Editor
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
TIVE CTURE Architecture Briefs is a Princeton Architectural Press series that addresses a variety of single topics of interest to architecture students and professionals. Field-specific and technical information, ranging from handdrawn to digital methods, is presented in a user-friendly manner alongside basics of architectural thought, design, and construction. The series familiarizes readers with the concepts and skills necessary to successfully translate ideas into built form. Also in the Architecture Briefs series: Architectural Lighting: Designing with Light and Space Hervé Descottes, Cecilia E. Ramos 978-1-56898-938-9 Architectural Photography the Digital Way Gerry Kopelow 978-1-56898-697-5 Building Envelopes: An Integrated Approach Jenny Lovell 978-1-56898-818-4 Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques Lisa Iwamoto 978-1-56898-790-3 Ethics for Architects: 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice Thomas Fisher 978-1-56898-946-4 Hypernatural: Architecture’s New Relationship with Nature Blaine Brownell, Marc Swackhamer 978-1-61689-272-2
Material Strategies: Innovative Applications in Architecture Blaine Brownell 978-1-56898-986-0 Model Making Megan Werner 978-1-56898-870-2 Old Buildings, New Designs: Architectural Transformations Charles Bloszies 978-1-61689-035-3 Philosophy for Architects Branko Mitrović 978-1-56898-994-5 Sustainable Design: A Critical Guide David Bergman 978-1-56898-941-9 Urban Composition: Designing Community through Urban Design Mark Childs 978-1-61689-052-0 Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities Alexandra Lange 978-1-61689-053-7
CONTENTS 7 9
14 18 28 30 36
48 52 60 68 78
86 90 98 106 114
118 123
Foreword by Ruairi Glynn Introduction: Catalyst Design in a Connected World EXHILARATE May/September / Urbana Technorama Facade / Ned Kahn Windswept / Charles Sowers Reef / Rob Ley, Rob Ley Studio and Joshua G. Stein, Radical Craft COMMUNICATE Lightswarm / Future Cities Lab Plinthos / MAB Architecture BALLS! / Ruairi Glynn and Alma-nac MegaFaces / Asif Khan Ltd. MEDIATE Al Bahar Towers / Abdulmajid Karanouh, Aedas Architects KfW WestarkadeTower / Sauerbruch Hutton Eco-29 / FoxLin and Brahma Architects Smart Highway / Studio Roosegaarde and Heijmans Infrastructure EVOLVE HygroScope + HygroSkin / Achim Menges with Steffen Reichert and Oliver David Kreig
132 140
146 151 160 164
172 172 174
Bloom / DOSU ShapeShift / Manuel Kretzer CATALYZE Epiphyte Chamber / Philip Beesley Conventions of Control / Michael Fox and Allyn Polancic Alloplastic Architecture / Behnaz Farahi Bouzanjani Acknowledgments Notes Project Credits
FOREWORD Looking through the work in this book, I am immediately struck by how much has changed in the landscape of interactive architecture over the past five years. Where Michael Fox’s first book on the field, written with Miles Kemp, presented a vast and promising array of protoarchitectural projects, here we see how quickly the field is maturing, evolving into ambitious permanent and semipermanent installations. I believe this collection of work reflects an exciting opportunity, in a world of rapid technological change, for architecture to expand its practice and reaffirm itself as the melting pot of the arts and sciences. At the Interactive Architecture Lab, we’re finding that sensory and responsive technologies expose new and surprising ways to make connections across disparate fields, such as between robotics and the performing arts, wearable computing and perceptual sciences, biology and the visual arts, and artificial intelligence and digital fabrication.1 And all of this is happening within the wider context of whirlwind progress in robotics that promises driverless cars, autonomous flying vehicles, and seemingly endless other computerized forms that will soon share our built environment. As these technologies become part of our design tool kit, our typical aesthetic considerations of space, form, and surface expand to encompass concerns of the aesthetics of behavior. Increasingly active, responsive, and kinetic, the material of the built environment is being animated in the truest sense of the word. Architecture imbued with autonomy, an uncanny sense of life, challenges us to look beyond design disciplines to understand the perceptual, emotional, and social effects of these pervasive technologies. Puppetry, an ancient art with a rich, albeit poorly recorded, history, offers us a performative perspective. The trained puppeteer, a conjurer of what Roman Paska calls the “theatre of possession,” 7
exploits the spectator’s sensitivity to the subtitles of motion cues.2 Through careful manipulation of rods and strings with rhythmic motion, the essential breath of the puppet manifests as life: the speed, duration, acceleration, and deceleration profiles of motion conveying inner emotional states. With the subtlest of changes in rhythm, the puppeteer conveys character in matter, with causal and narrative relationships born of the performance of objects and their environment. Even with little more than breath, a thrilling, complex, and challenging set of aesthetic opportunities can be harnessed, and as the range of gestures grows, the potential to imbue objects and, indeed, architecture with life and character seems endless. Throughout the history of natural and social sciences, from Aristotle’s theories of motion as the exclusive characteristic of living things and the early anthropological studies of primitive cultures to the foundations of perceptual and cognitive psychology, we find the association of movement with life itself to be deep and universal. Today’s advancements in medical imaging are revealing the neurological roots of this association; it’s in the very architecture of the social human brain. At its core is the instinct to anthropomorphize the nonhuman, whether animal, inanimate object, or even natural phenomenon—to project personality onto other entities as a means of better relating to them. So as the worlds of architecture and robotics collide, offering new motive and spatial forms of interaction, the cerebral processes of human social relationships are irresistibly stimulated. This renders in strange and uncanny terms a built environment that may viscerally feel worthy of our care and consideration in ways that inanimate matter cannot. We may come to perceive an anthropomorphized architecture as responsible for its own behavior and perhaps even deserving of punishment or reward. As the eminent robotics engineer and philosopher
Rodney Brooks has commented, “I’ll eventually feel we have succeeded if we ever get to the point where people feel bad about switching Cog X off.”3 The surreal psychological and social effects are impossible to fully anticipate. What seems certain is that we are at present ill-equipped either conceptually or technically to understand and craft this new aesthetic of behavior. But then this is really what is so fascinating and what compels us to pursue the potential of interactive architecture. We can’t forget that machines are not an entirely new preoccupation. Vitruvius dedicated an entire book of his treaties to machines. Greek mythology told us of Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth at Knossos, who also crafted magnificent mechanical statues. And by the Renaissance, automatons flourished to act as centerpieces in royal courts and town squares alike. The Florentine Francini brothers’ hydraulic statues of Saint-Germain-en-Laye famously inspired Descartes to construct his own automaton; a pursuit of understanding that challenged the relationship between the body-machine and the mind-soul, it animated not only cogs and levers, but also the very foundations of Western philosophy. There is something essentially human about making things that come to life, whether they are mechanical, robotic, cyborg, or architectural. It touches upon a human fascination with looking for life in the inanimate on the one hand and a yearning to play god on the other.4 The words magic and machine share the common etymological root magh, meaning “to be able” and “to have power.” We have a compulsion to understand other living things and to imitate them. Art itself may be understood as product of the human need to remake the world in search of deeper understanding. Let’s continue that search through code, electronics, networks, mechanics, materials, and novel methods of fabrication. As distinctions
between designer and engineer, fabricator and philosopher dissolve, architecture occupies the foreground as a space of radical multidisciplinary or even antidisciplinary practice. Let this be an opportunity for architects to ask questions not only about the future of our homes, workplaces, and public spaces, but also about what it is to be human, our social nature, the future of communities mediated by technology, and our changing relationship to the inanimate and animate world around us. Ruairi Glynn, 2016
INTRODUCTION: CATALYST DESIGN IN A CONNECTED WORLD As we embrace a world in which the lines between the physical and the digital are increasingly blurred, we see a maturing vision for architecture that actively participates in our lives. In the few years since the original Interactive Architecture was published, a number of projects have been built at scales that both move beyond the scope of the architectural exhibit as test bed and push the boundaries of our thinking in terms of material performance, connectivity, and control. Our architectural surroundings have become so inextricably tied to technological trends that the two ultimately and simultaneously respond to and define each other. The promise of ubiquitous computing has secured a permanent foothold in our lives and has begun to infiltrate our devices and objects as well as our buildings and environments. Such is our physical world: not just digital but also seamlessly networked and connected, an architectural world that is a direct participant in our lives. Bill Gates once predicted that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century there would be nothing untouched by the digital.1 By the end of the second decade, states the interaction designer Behnaz Farahi Bouzanjani, this impact will arguably have become so pervasive that computation will not be noticeable anymore.2 The subject of this book is how architectural design integrates and negotiates the digital; in our contemporary context, this is nothing short of reciprocal innovation. This book surveys the rapidly evolving landscape of projects and trends that are finally catching up with the past. As a matter of definition, interactive architectural environments are built upon the convergence of embedded computation and a physical counterpart that satisfies adaptation within the framework of interaction. It encompasses both buildings and environments that have been designed to respond, adapt, change, and come to life. Young designers have started to realize that it is possible to build anything they can imagine. 9
Sensors available today can discern almost anything, from complex gestures to CO2 emissions to hair color. An interconnected digital world means, in addition to having sensory perception, that data sets—ranging from Internet usage to traffic patterns and crowd behaviors—can be drivers of interactive buildings or environments. Courses in robotic prototyping and interaction are commonly taught in today’s architecture programs, with contextual subjects ranging from urban social issues to practical sustainability. Perhaps equally as important as the rapid advance of such technologies is the fact that both robotics and interaction are technically and economically accessible. The requisite technologies are simple enough to enable designers who are not experts in computer science to prototype their ideas in an affordable way and communicate their design intent. Architects and designers are not expected, as on exhibit-scale projects, to execute their interactive designs alone; they are expected, rather, to possess enough foundational knowledge in the area to contribute. In the same way, while architects need to learn structural engineering in school and, until recently, have been required to pass a special section on structures for the professional licensing exam, it is rarely assumed that architects will do the structural calculations for the buildings they design; that work is carried out by professional structural engineers. The field is fresh with original ideas, illuminated by the built prototypes and architectural projects illustrated in this book. Driven by the applications, these genuinely new developments and ideas will rapidly foster advanced thinking within the discipline; yet it is important to understand that their foundations have been around for quite some time, dating back nearly thirty years. CATCHING UP WITH THE PAST Essentially, the theoretical work of a number of people working in cybernetics in the early 1960s laid
Author’s caricature of the cyberneticians Norbert Wiener and Gordon Pask
most of the groundwork for the projects highlighted in this book. During this time, Gordon Pask, Norbert Wiener, and other cyberneticians made advancements toward understanding and identifying the field of interactive architecture by formulating their theories on the topic. Pask’s conversation theory informed much of the original development in interactive architecture, basically establishing a model by which architects interpreted spaces and users as complete feedback systems.3 Cybernetic theory continued to be developed into the late sixties and early seventies by the likes of Warren Brody, Nicholas Negroponte, Charles Eastman, Andrew Rabeneck, and others, who expanded upon the earlier ideas of Pask and Wiener. These early philosophies were then picked up by a few architects who solidly translated them into the arena of architecture. This work generally remained in the realm of paper architecture, however. Cedric Price was perhaps the most influential of the early architects to adopt the initial theoretical work in cybernetics, expanding it into the architectural concept of anticipatory architecture. John Frazer extended Price’s ideas in positing that architecture should be a “living, 10
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evolving thing.”4 Yet it is important to understand that while architects were developing these concepts, areas of digital computation and human interaction were advancing in parallel fashion within the sphere of computer science. From this work, fields such as intelligent environments (IE) were formed to study spaces with embedded computation and communication technologies, in turn creating spaces that bring computation into the physical world. Intelligent environments are defined as spaces in which computation is seamlessly used to enhance ordinary activity.5 Numerous technologies were developed in this area to deal with sensory perception and human behaviors, but the corresponding architecture was always secondary as it was developed under the mantra of “seamlessly embedded computation.” In other words, there was very little architectural involvement in the developing field of computationally enhanced environments. Corporate interests, meanwhile, established market-driven interests that played a major role in computationally enhanced environments through the development of numerous market-driven products and systems that directly involved users in the real world. In the 1990s
there were “smart home” and “smart workplace” projects being initiated at every turn that relished the newly available technologies. For the first time, wireless networks, embedded computation, and sensor effectors became both technologically and economically feasible to implement by computer science. This feasibility fueled experimentation with many of the ideas of the previously mentioned visionary architects and theoreticians, who had been stifled by the technological and economic hurdles of their day. We are now at a time when the economics of affordable computational hardware and increased aptitude for integrating computational intelligence into our environments has become accessible to architects. A CONNECTED WORLD The influence of technological and economic feasibility within a connected world has resulted in the explosion of current exploration with the foundations of interaction design in architecture. The Internet of Things (IoT) has quite rapidly come to define the technological context of interactive design as all-inclusive, existing within this connectedness in a way that affects essentially everything, from graphics to objects to buildings to cities. To use an architectural analogy, the theoretical foundations have a structure that resides in the connected worlds of Web and mobile and spatial interfacing, and they are still evolving. Theories of a connected architectural world existed long before mobile devices and Web-interface technologies changed every aspect of our lives and created the discipline of interaction design. While the first wave of connectivity focused on human-to-human communication, the current focus is on connected things and devices, which extends naturally to buildings, cities, and global environments. There are approximately one billion websites and about five billion mobile phones, 11
INTRODUCTION
while there are approximately fifty billion smart devices.6 It is the goal (and responsibility) of the Internet of Things to connect them in a meaningful way.7 These intelligent things are everywhere in our lives, and many of them are already seamlessly embedded in our architecture, from our kitchen appliances and our HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems to our home entertainment systems. For the time being, most of them are weakly connected at best. Today the Internet supports hundreds of protocols, and it will support hundreds more. While the world struggles with a protocol platform, the battle over which protocol will prevail is being waged at a staggering commercial cost, often referred to as the “protocol wars.” There are numerous contenders in the game—the IoT needs many. Currently heading the pack are CoAP, MQTT, and XMPP. The important difference between them lies in the distinction of application or the class of use. Devices must communicate with each other (D2D); device data must then be collected and sent to the server infrastructure (D2S). That server infrastructure has to share device data (S2S), possibly providing it back to devices, to analysis programs, or to people.8 Eventually, all of these connected things will need an infrastructure to enable them to work together. There are a number of companies currently vying for position; their approaches range from cloud-based software (with precedent in things like vending-machine inventory and engine maintenance) to ultra-narrowband radio transmissions. More than likely, the familiar tech trend will prevail: all of the novel small companies with their individual takes on a similar problem will be pounced on by Apple, Microsoft, or Google, who will then take the best of each of them and create their own platforms. The goal of these big companies is to lock everything into their powerful existing systems. There is currently a need for standardization to avoid having one of the big companies determine
this eventual fate, which could indeed result in a nightmare where nothing works outside a proprietary system. “By embracing open standards, we can ensure we won’t be locked out of a device or forced to use only one type of connector at the whim of a single company,” says Mat Honan in WIRED magazine.9 We have in the past embraced such standards, whereby almost all mobile devices already communicate via the same Bluetooth wireless standard. The point is that every existing company needs to rally behind a common standard—and do it soon. Scott Fisher, the founding chair of the Interdivisional Media Arts + Practice (iMAP) PhD program of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC), observes: “The growing number of ubiquitous and embedded computing technologies introduces a new paradigm for how we interact with the built environment, while mobile and pervasive devices offer new possibilities for sensing and communicating with buildings and objects in the physical world. These technologies are used not only for collecting and providing data, but also as a way to animate and collectively augment the world around us.”10 Interactions are no longer limited to those of people interacting with an object, environment, or building, but can now be carried out as part of a larger ecosystem of connected objects, environments, and buildings that autonomously interact with each other. Much of the work at iMAP has been focused on creating interactive architectural environments in which the buildings themselves become storytelling characters. As the design researcher Jen Stein states, “By inviting inhabitants to engage with both the building and other inhabitants, we have introduced a new paradigm for place making within an animated, interactive environment.”11 Usman Haque is a designer with a background in interactive architecture who has led the way in developing a scalable platform for connectivity with Pachube, which provides a platform for connecting 12
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various sensor data and visualizations. Through the development of an Extended Environmental Markup Language (EEML), the platform handles both Web-based and mobile applications for the sharing of sensory and environmental data in real time. Pachube was acquired by COSM, then acquired by Xively (LogMeIn), which encourages open digital ecosystems, connecting more than 250 million devices, including electricity meters, weather stations, building-management systems, air-quality stations, and biosensors, to name just a few. Architectural applications are iterative in such a connected context. The sensors and robotic components are now both affordable and simple enough for the design community to access; and all of the parts can easily be digitally connected to each other. Designing interactive architecture in particular is not inventing so much as understanding what technology exists and extrapolating from it to suit an architectural vision. In this respect, the designers of buildings, cities, and larger interconnected ecosystems have learned a great deal from the rapidly developing field of tangible interaction, essentially an alternate vision for interfacing that was developed to bring computing back into the real world. Tangible user interfaces were envisioned as an alternative to graphical displays—an alternative that would bring some of the richness of the interaction we have with physical devices back into our interaction with digital content.12 In contrast, the field of industrial design came to engage with tangible interaction out of necessity as appliances became progressively “intelligent,” containing more and more electronic and digital components.13 Broadly, tangible interaction encompasses user interfaces and interaction approaches that emphasize the sensory appeal and materiality of the interface, the physical embodiment of data, whole-body interaction, and the embedding of the interface and the users’ interaction in real spaces and contexts.
Tangible interaction is a highly interdisciplinary area. It spans a variety of perspectives, among them human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design, but specializes in interfaces or systems that are in some way physically embodied. Furthermore, it has connections with product and industrial design, arts, and architecture. In a sense, interactive architecture falls under the umbrella of tangible interaction along with environments and physicalartifact, product, and industrial design, only the scale is often much larger. Although tangible interaction typically deals with the interfacing of objects and artifacts, the connected capabilities have opened up a wealth of possibilities not only at the scale of the building, but also in the city and beyond. One of the pioneers in this area has been the MIT SENSEable City lab, led by Carlo Ratti (who also comes from a background in architecture). The lab has done extensive research into how real-time data generated by sensors, mobile phones, and other ubiquitous technologies can teach us how cities are used and how new technologies will ultimately redefine the urban landscape. Ratti argues that urban planning is not just about cities, but about understanding the combination of physical and digital. Ratti says “[T]he interesting thing is that now the machine, the computer, is becoming the city. The city has become the interface—to retrieve information, to meet other people, to do all the things happening now with this mixing of bits and atoms. So it’s this new exciting equation, putting together people, space, and technology.”14 Additionally, the Situated Technologies initiative, led by Omar Kahn, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, has had a major influence in this area through symposia, competitions, and publications. The initiative, which emerges from architecture as opposed to computer science, takes into account the social dimension of ubiquitous computing. 13
INTRODUCTION
It is impossible to predict how quickly interactive architecture will be widely executed or what standards and protocols will work their way to the fore. Yet the projects in this book illustrate that such standards and protocols are becoming an inevitable and completely integral part of how we will make our buildings environments and cities in the future. The platform is ripe to foster unique applications tied to our living trends, which both affect and are affected by digital technology. The chapters that follow document a select number of pioneering projects that are defining the future of interaction. The projects, which are illuminated firsthand by images and text from the architects and designers who brought them to life, give insight into the technology and construction that will be an inevitable and integral part of how we think about architecture. Within a profession recently dominated by a discourse of style, we have begun to detect a shift away from questions of representation and images toward processes and behaviors.15 Specific categorical areas have consequently come to the fore as designers have forged ahead to pioneer this new area of design. Therefore the projects are organized not by how they are made or how they look, but rather according to what they do: exhilarate, communicate, mediate, evolve, and catalyze. Michael Fox, 2016
EXHILARA Definition: to make cheerful and excited; enliven, elate, move Related words: arouse, incite, inspire, provoke, stimulate; bewitch, captivate, charm, delight, enchant, enthrall, hypnotize, mesmerize, rivet, spellbind; interest, intrigue, tantalize Merriam-Webster OnLine, s.v. “exhilarate,” accessed March 25, 2015, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exhilarate.
18 28 30 36
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MAY/SEPTEMBER / Urbana TECHNORAMA FACADE / Ned Kahn WINDSWEPT / Charles Sowers REEF / Rob Ley, Rob Ley Studio and Joshua G. Stein, Radical Craft
A TE
If an environment could adapt to our desires,
it would have the ability to shape our experience. The projects in this chapter highlight the emotive possibilities of interactive architecture. There is a great deal of built precedence in interactive applications geared toward the evocation of feeling, ranging from those that simply provide pleasure to those that enable social engagement and contribute educational benefits. In the public realm, artistic structures such as sculptures, fountains, and facades have adopted interactivity as a vital component, inherent to the works in order to capture an audience. Museums as well have rapidly embraced interactivity with respect to the demands of presenting and viewing exhibits and artifacts. Interactivity combined with spatial adaptability can serve well the temporal nature of changing displays and visitors’ interaction with them. Many applications incorporate an educational component whereby kinesthetic learning is combined with entertainment experiences. Such applications enable users to utilize their bodies as well as their minds in collaborative ways. Children seem happy to learn when an entertaining interactive component is involved; being able to control the narrative engages them. While interactive entertainment is rapidly moving into the physical realm, it is a concept born of electronic media. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan lists “three key pleasures” that are uniquely intensified in electronic media: immersion, rapture, and agency. Immersion, he says, is “the sense of being transported to another reality”; rapture is the “entranced attachment to the objects in that reality”; and agency is “the player’s delight in having an effect on the electronic world.” In the world of entertainment, an engaging environment is by definition successful. Looking at the projects that follow, we see four very different installations that all work successfully to exhilarate. All of the projects express a critical dimension of time and transformation brought about by
16
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physical change. William Zuk and Roger Clark state in their groundbreaking book Kinetic Architecture that “our present task is to unfreeze architecture, to make it a fluid, vibrating, changeable backdrop for the varied and constantly changing modes of life. An expanding, contracting, pulsating, changing architecture would reflect life as it is today and therefore be part of it.”1 Kostas Terzidis explains that “deformation, juxtaposition, superimposition, absence, disturbance, and repetition are just a few of the techniques used by architects to express virtual motion and change.”2 He clarifies the polarity that while the form and structure of the average building suggests stability, steadiness, sturdiness, and immobility, the introduction of motion may suggest agility, unpredictability, or uncertainty and may also imply change, anticipation, and liveliness. The integration of motion into the built environment, and the impact of such results upon the aesthetics, design, and performance of buildings, may be of great importance to the field of architecture: “While the aesthetic value of virtual motion may always be a source of inspiration, its physical implementation in buildings and structures may challenge the very nature of what architecture really is.”3 It is important to understand that adaptation in this context is not quite as simple as satisfying needs. The architect Cheng-An Pan states: “Needs and desires change, permitting new options to be employed, allowing greater freedom of geographical movement, accepting personal whim, recognizing changing roles and functions, encouraging personal identity, reflecting mutations in economic levels, and adapting to any change which affects architectural form.”4 The implications of kinetic architecture touch upon building performance on one hand and aesthetic phenomenology on the other. At an architectural scale, projects often must do both. In the project titled May/September, installed by Urbana on the Eskenazi Hospital parking structure
facade, the primary goal was to create an exhilarating effect at an urban scale. And yet, as principal Rob Ley points out, the artwork also serves very pragmatically as a visual screen for the ordinary parking structure behind, masking the everyday things one might see there, such as cars, concrete beams, columns, and guardrails. It was required that the piece allow for substantial ventilation, which, as a necessity, worked naturally with the concept. The data from the noise influences the intense visual screen both conceptually and as a functional driver in the image creation. States Ley: “While noise is often understood as an unfortunate by-product of image or sound reproduction, in this case it becomes a modifier of a condition. In the same way that grain can impart a tonal contribution to a photographic image, it can also be synthesized into a numeric data set in such a way that obscurity is controlled.” As with many projects in this area, we see the controlled translation of urban phenomenon. In May/September, the data, or noise, is technologically sensed and translated to another visual sense so that we can understand it through different patterns. Translation is also a central theme in the two projects in this section created by Ned Kahn and Charles Sowers. Their work hinges on illuminating unnoticed or invisible phenomena, where the drivers are not only illuminating and, indeed, exhilarating, but are all the more powerful because they teach us about something we might not have been aware of or could not in fact perceive through our senses alone. In some cases this practice involves scaling up the phenomena; in others, it simply means adding a field of passive agents that can be manipulated by forces, making it possible for us to understand. Many (if not most) of the projects in this book rely on a data set of some kind that is sensed and then translated back to the participants. Often the intention is to visualize existing complex patterns and reinterpret them in a medium that is simple enough to comprehend. 17
EXHILARATE
Although designers understand and have demonstrated that it is possible to perceive and create data from anything, the power of Kahn’s and Sowers’s work lies in the exhilarating effect of translating natural phenomena. Their installations don’t just make us aware of that which we haven’t perceived; they do so in a way that moves us emotionally. For the Technorama Building at the Swiss Science Center, Kahn designed a facade composed of thousands of aluminum panels that move in the air currents to reveal the complex patterns of turbulence in the wind. He is admittedly less concerned with creating a reality than with unveiling the world in perceptible ways. With Windswept, Sowers takes a similar approach to translation yet in a particularly low-tech manner, reinterpreting the effects of the wind in a way that rewards extended observation. Windswept serves as a scientific instrument of sorts, acting as a discrete window onto a very large phenomenon that until now has been invisible. The last project in this section takes a high-tech approach that relies on a sympathetic understanding of human behaviors. The same emotive quality brought about in Kahn’s and Sowers’s portfolios via the translation of natural phenomena is achieved by technological means in the Reef project by Rob Ley of Rob Ley Studio and Joshua Stein of Radical Craft. The behavior of the “reef,” which responds to people in its space, emulates that of plants and lower-level organisms that are considered responsive but not conscious. Their concern with a nonmechanized, efficient, and fluid movement derives from our emotive interpretation and response to such behaviors. Ley remarks that “Reef’s unique exploration of technology shifts from the biomimetic to the biokinetic while liberating and extending architecture’s capacity to produce a sense of willfulness.” He concludes that “behavior may ultimately be more important than intelligence as we strive for a viable model of interactivity of space and the user.”
MAY/SEPTEMBER Urbana
This project sought to explore parallels between techniques of two-dimensional image construction and the tectonic considerations of building enclosure. Through rigorous examination of digital image manipulation and reproduction techniques, a strategy for the articulation of complex arrangements of patterns and edges across a building facade was developed. The primary conceptual intention of the project was twofold: first, to interrogate the notion of optimization with respect to our contemporary understanding of fabrication, using image as a conceptual link between the efficiency of a digital system and the performance of a real-world tectonic system; 18
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second, to exploit the effects of such a strategy, so that the reduction in resolution of the system enhances the spatial qualities. In this way, optimization becomes an asset to spatial conditioning, rather than a necessary compromise. The use of digital image mapping and pixel data–extraction techniques in the development of architectural form is neither new nor groundbreaking. In fact, examination of the pixel might be the most rudimentary means of extracting data for digital abstraction and manipulation. For instance, the extraction of color and brightness values from an image as a means of manipulating some systemic design parameter across a field
Facade exterior and Eskenazi Hospital parking structure in Indianapolis
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EXHILARATE
Details of facade flaps
condition features heavily in even the most conceptually superficial attempts at digital design. Yet very rarely is the construction of the digital image itself examined with any degree of rigor. In the development of May/September, examination of image began further upstream, at the point at which the image itself is created, taking into account the distortion, abstraction, and optical processing that occurs so that the image in question may be efficiently projected onto a screen. This process of altering the “actual� image data not only increases the efficiency of the digital file but also brings the image closer to its real-world likeness. 20
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Noise, as a concept and as a function, becomes an important tool in the development of the facade. While noise is often understood as an unfortunate by-product of image or sound reproduction, in this case it becomes a modifier of a condition. In the same way that grain can impart a tonal contribution to a photographic image, it can be synthesized into a numeric data set so that obscurity is controlled. The introduction of noise is therefore extremely useful, both in a quantitative sense (by minimizing necessary resources or processing power) and in a qualitative sense (by improving the likeness of the resultant digital image).
Contemporary modes of digital production often strive to capitalize on the potential for unrestrained differentiation in design and output. Mass-customization of components is rapidly becoming the status quo, yet how much of this differentiation is actually necessary for the articulation of gradient spatial conditions? Within the academic discourse of architecture, there is an ongoing trend to embrace infinite variability of components, even though the theoretical ideal of mass-customization remains at odds with the reality of mainstream contemporary construction and fabrication techniques, particularly on an architectural scale. In a typical fabrication context, every variation in assembly component is coupled with a substantial increase in time, labor, and cost—and it would be naive to believe otherwise. This brings the notion of waste to the forefront, both conceptually and pragmatically. As techniques and technology continue to foster the variability of components an inevitable tipping point may be seen on the horizon, at which we start to observe that just because we can doesn’t mean we should. The obvious goal of optimization is to reduce the number of components necessary to create 21
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a spatial effect before the system breaks or the overarching design intention is no longer coherent. Beyond this goal, however, there is potential for the process of reductive optimization to improve the spatial integrity of the system. It then becomes both necessary and beneficial to exploit moments of commonality and repetition within the system. The production of images has naturally followed the historic limitations of print (and, later, digital) technology. Most are familiar with the movable type of the Gutenberg press and the woodblock printing that preceded it. These early technologies—and the improved versions centuries later—allowed for the relatively quick production of printed type. As technology advanced, so did the capability of including images along with type through various mechanically reproducible means. Of particular interest in the project is how binary conditions in the printmaking world resulted in an increased focus on obtaining the most from the least: the ability to produce complex images, including perceived shades of gray or various color hues, while still being produced with a single color. Halftoning is the most commonly used method today and a
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23
PROJECT
above and right: Facade elevation and section detail
Anodized aluminum panels with powder-coat paint on one side
good example of a technique that uses a limited palette along with spacing and dot sizing to create a complex image. May/September derives a noise-based textural building enclosure by leveraging a palette of architectural components from the phenomenal qualities of dithering and error-diffusion in printmaking. In this way, three basic typologies with three sized subsets, along with part mirroring, produce a palette of eighteen unique parts. These components, along with a yellow/blue binary color palette, produce a complex, though nuanced, condition from a relatively small set of variables. The manipulation and translation of a limited set of components is a more interesting challenge than just adding more unique parts.
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INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE
New unistrut-type steel mounting structure attaches to and in front of existing tube steel framework
Existing concrete structure
Art Panel Sizes and Orientation
16"
50.0°
16"
8"
Bolts Bolts (Type Spacing TBC) (Type &&Spacing TBC)
8"
50.0°
Folded Metal Folded Metal
Folded Metal Leaf (Thickness and Coating TBD)
FOLD
Length 1
Component typologies
Bolt (Type TBD)
12"
8"
8"
16"
30.0°
16"
8"
Structural Steel Structural Steel Steel Structural Column (Size and Type TBD)
8" 24"
30.0°
FOLD
24"
FOLD
FOLD
12"
Length 2
12"
16"
12"
24"
12"
10.0°
32"
10.0°
12" 16"
12"
16"
12"
12"
MIRROR Mirror
MIRROR
FOLD
16"
FOLD
16"
Length 3
FOLD
10.0°
Type 3
32" Type 2
Type 1
16"
16"
10.0°
Type 3 Mirrored
Type 2 Mirrored
32"
F OLD
LD
FOLD
FO
F OLD
FO
The metal panels are to be anchored to a lightweight The metal panels are to be anchored metal tubing system - the size and specific material to a lightweight metal tubing system of which will be specified in accordance with advice the size and specific of which from a structural engineermaterial as the project evolves.
will be specified in accordance with advice from a structural engineer as the project evolves.
30.0°
16"
16"
16"
While variability of experience is an important goal of the piece, the system has been designed with efficiency of goal While variability of experience is an important fabrication and installation mind. with of the piece, the system has beenindesigned efficiency fabrication and 6,500 installation in mind. Within aoffield of nearly individual Within a field of nearly 6,500three individual pieces, pieces, there exist only different there only three piece lengths and pieceexist lengths anddifferent three different three different fold angles strategically rotated and fold angles strategically rotated and distributed to create the illusion of infinite distributed to create the illusion ofvariability across the canvas of the façade. infinite variability across the canvas of the facade.
LD
16"
30.0° 45.0°
22.5°
50.0°
45.0°
FOLD
22.5°
50.0° Eskenazi Hospital Parking Garage Façade
Design Development [ Nov 2012 ]
Note: Fabricator to coordinate hole arrangement and fastener with structural engineering drawings, calculations, and specifications
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EXHILARATE
Urbana, Rob Ley
Diagrams of facade flap types
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INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE
Dithering and noise studies
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EXHILARATE
TECHNORAMA FACADE Ned Kahn
In 2002 Ned Kahn worked with the staff of Technorama, the Swiss Science Center, and the institution’s architectural office of Durig and Rami to create a six-story facade for the building. The facade comprises thousands of aluminum panels, set in motion by air currents to reveal the complex patterns of turbulence in the wind. For the installation, the entire 220-foot-long (67.1 m) facade of the museum was covered with eighty thousand wind-animated panels. The brushed-aluminum surface of the panels reflects light and color from the sky and the surrounding buildings. As a whole, the facade 28
INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE
is the focal point of the large urban plaza in front of the museum. Each moving element is a three-inch (7.6 cm) square of thin aluminum with a low-friction plastic bearing pressed into the top edge. These bearings ride on stainless-steel axles, held by an aluminum framework to the structural beams of the building. Each element responds uniquely to the wind’s forces, but the entire facade displays complex, coordinated movements that coalesce into a rendering of the larger-scale patterns and textures of its passing. The artwork has survived extreme windstorms, ice storms, and more than a decade of constant
above and opposite, top: Views of center with facade in motion
Details of facade in different states
Facade at rest
exposure to the sun without damage or degradation. Applying the same strategy by which trees deflect damage in high winds with their leaves, the small surface area of each individual moving element in the Technorama Facade reduces the effect of the forces that build up during a storm. 29
EXHILARATE
WINDSWEPT Charles Sowers
Windswept, commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission for a permanent installation at the Randall Museum, is a wind-driven kinetic facade that transforms a blank wall into an observational instrument and reveals the complex interactions between wind and environment. Over the years, Charles Sowers has become increasingly interested in rooting his works in the dynamics and phenomena of their particular location. Many of these works are a blend of aesthetics and information. This has led to a kind of aesthetic/scientific instrumentation that reacts to a site and promotes insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena. Through such 30
INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE
work Sowers hopes to engage people in an unexpected dialogue with their locale and provoke the desire to notice the beauty and intrigue of the world around them. The Randall Museum site, like many in San Francisco, is characterized to a great extent by its relationship to the wind. Climatically, offshore winds bring warm weather from California’s Central Valley, while onshore winds produce San Francisco’s famously chilly weather. Sowers knew he wanted to work with the wind. Initially he proposed an altogether different idea in a different location, but then the museum’s staff articulated the desire to address a blank wall thirty feet high
Facade in motion as viewed from parking lot
(9.1 m) and thirty-five feet (10.6 m) wide, that faces the parking lot and is the first impression visitors have of their facility. Drawing attention to the unnoticed or unseen is a dominant theme in Sowers’s work, and Windswept is no exception. It presents actual physical phenomena that draw people into a conscientious noticing and interaction. The design consists of 612 freely rotating directional arrows, which serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon. Wind gusts, rippling and swirling through the sculpture, visually reveal the complex and ever-changing way the wind interacts with the 31
EXHILARATE
building and its environment. The arrows are balanced so that they remain at rest in their last position; thus they preserve a snapshot of the last wind gust even when calm. In this way the piece conveys movement even when it is not actually in motion. The aim was to provoke a sense of delight and wonder and reward extended observation. Typically of Sowers, this work involves setting up conditions for some other force to animate or complete, whether that completion is achieved by the interplay of some natural phenomenon, the interaction of viewers, or both. Windswept was inspired by scientific diagrams called vector fields, which show the
Studies of fin types
Context diagram
direction and intensity of certain phenomena, like wind, fluid flow, or magnetic fields. Sowers, who always found these diagrams intriguing, got the idea that he could make an animated physical analog. Like vector-field diagrams, Windswept seeks to reveal information about the wind. More than an informational graphing technique, however, it is a real-time, highly kinetic instrument that reveals the interaction between the site and the wind. Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon; Windswept allows us to see the beautiful complexity of wind flowing through the built environment. Sowers spent more than a year and a half prototyping and testing wind-vane designs, beginning by purchasing a number of commercially available maritime wind vanes, mounting them on a panel, and testing them in a wind. He quickly discovered that these products were inadequate to his requirements as they were not durable enough, and their bearings are designed for rotation in a horizontal plane. He needed them to rotate in a vertical plane as well as to be readable from a distance and from a vantage point other than that which maritime wind vanes 32
INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE
Construction of facade structure
are made for. This led Sowers down a path of inquiry and experimentation with wind-vane design. His initial designs were rather naive, and his lack of understanding was quickly revealed when he held them out the car window while driving down the road or simply ran around with them like a six-year-old: the vanes would align perpendicularly to the airflow or oscillate back and forth. He made several dozen paper models of different designs and tested them at the beach or outside his apartment, in an investigation that was both functional and aesthetic. Ultimately Sowers tested eight different aluminum arrows, for nearly a year on-site and for a
year and a half outside his apartment window, in the very harsh salt air of Baker Beach in San Francisco’s Presidio. The final wind arrows are made of brakeformed anodized aluminum. The arrow axles are mounted to a standard, metal, architectural wall system consisting of twenty-five panels. The panel wall was set off the existing concrete masonry unity (CMU) wall to allow an equal volume of airflow for an HVAC vent that the sculpture covers. Holes were then punched in the panels in a twelve-by-twelve-foot (3.7 by 3.7 m) grid pattern, into which the installation contractor secured rivet nuts to accept the 33
EXHILARATE
stainless-steel axles. Once the panels were installed, the arrow assemblies were threaded into the rivet nuts. The total installation time was just four days, and the result is has been gratifying for Sowers; he had understood how a small number of arrows moved in the wind but had been able only to imagine how the whole assemblage would behave; in this way Windswept truly has been an experimental instrument, allowing for the observation of a phenomenon that could be envisioned and possibly modeled but not persistently perceived in the real world.
Details of facade in various states
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INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE
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EXHILARATE